A very interesting, if somewhat technical, visualisation of Jules Verne ATV movements during Demo Day 2.

The clip was prepared using telemetry data generated during the joint simulation training on 1 February, which was then fed into a sophisticated simulation tool.

This video gives an extremely faithful visualisation of what actually happened as ATV closed in on the Station on 31 March. Click on 'Full story' for details and to access video links. -- Daniel

This animation shows very accurately the profile of ATV manoeuvres with respect to the ISS on 31 March 2008.

It was created using data generated during the joint simulation training in February (which included ATV-CC and the US & Russian control centres). Note the thruster firings shown in the video were added manually during production as this data was not available when the data were recorded.

Luis Arguello, one of the team members working on the ATV simulation system at ESA, wrote:

[During Demo Day 2] we were running GEV (the simulation tool) driven by actual ATV Jules Verne telemetry, but the recording/video shown here is actually [based on data from] Joint Integrated Simulation (JIS) 9, held on 1 of February; this was the last rendezvous JIS performed before the ATV launch. We have more data (thrusters firing) in this simulation than [in the simulation database], therefore the video looks more spectacular and more interesting for the public.

He says that the simulation tool runs on Linux. "We replayed the JIS recorded data with the tool. We used a Linux frame grabber to capture the video, then we converted it to AVI format at 1200x912 in eight sequences; these were then merged into one file using a Mac tool."

Hearty thanks to Luis and everyone on the team at ESA who helped prepare this!

Access video links here:

Format .MOV (128 MB) - Watch with Apple Quicktime or VLC media player

Format .SWF (8 MB) - Watch with any Flash-enabled browser

Note: The first version of this post reported that the data had come from the actual telemetry recorded during Demo Day 2 - the misunderstanding was mine - regrets for the confusion. -- DS